Started out the morning with (FINALLY!) a bit of exercise. Or rather, a lot of exercise.
Amanda (one of my roommates) went jogging with me all the way out to the ジャスCo shopping center downtown (I’d say at least 4 miles), which was not so hard going out because it was mostly downhill. The trek back however…pretty goddamn tough. I ended up waaay ahead of her because she was going much slower and had to stop to walk, but we both felt pretty hard-core by the time we made it back. Even I had to walk a good portion of the way uphill to the seminar house – which would have been the case probably even without the insane balmy weather.
I was totally soaked through with sweat, and pretty dehydrated considering this was before breakfast. BUT! Exercise! YAY! I’m also going to start dropping rice out of most of my meals, and taking only a little bit of food for breakfast (which is still mostly buffet-style), which should cut at least 500 calories out of my three-square-meals-a-day diet. And if I can keep doing the jogging thing most days, that’ll put be back on track. I don’t think I’m doing too bad – my pants aren’t getting tight or anything, but I feel flabby…just a little.
Today was also討論会 for my group. We were debating rural versus urban lifestyles. Of course, I thought we’d prepared pretty well, until the other group came up with no less than five separate posters with various diagrams and such. *sigh* I stumbled through my introduction speech, and then fell into my usual clammed-up state. Tatsuya (a guy in the opposing group) kindly directed a question my way during the open-debate section, which I then fouled up. Harada-sensei also encouraged me to speak up, which was very considerate but really just made me feel worse. It was really nice of people to praise me for my shitty opening speech, since that was all they really could talk about, but I had to leave right after for fear of just breaking down and crying, as per usual when I get all worked up like that.
Stupid emotions…
Max and Julian (the other group members) picked up my slack without missing a beat, as to be expected, and I was very impressed with Max’s speaking ability, which I already had a pretty good idea was very fluid after hearing him talking to some Japanese people on the phone way back at the beginning of the trip.
Yay...Its all over.
Mom called this morning, and left like three messages, one of which was from the SoftBank Phone company, so I called her back. Apparently she’d been trying to call for two days but hadn’t been able to get through as was having a small fit about. She even called Waseda-Oregon at some point, but apparently didn’t get through.
After dinner I talked with Mr. Awkward again, and we played a bit of chess on his laptop. I lost. But, interestingly, he’s quite the chess buff, and was able to tell me that my typical first move (a pawn from either edge of the board) is known as the “Anderson Opening”, after famous chess-player Andre Anderson. He told me about the “Immortal Game” between Andre and some guy named Steinz or something, in which Anderson won, using that starting move, which is pretty ballsy as a first move considering it isn’t very advantageous (he told me he briefly thought I either a) knew exactly was I was doing and was going to pull a fast one on him, or b) had no clue what I was doing…and you know which it is). He has some really interesting philosophical theories about chess, which was nice to listen to, especially given the rather puddle-deep conversations I usually hear from my peers.
Earlier at dinner, Hisa-san asked me (somewhat randomly, I thought)“does Mr. Awkward always says weird things to you?”, to which I replied, half-joking, “ いつも, 毎回”("Yeah, all the time - every time!"). Hisa-san thought that was funny, but I wonder what had spurred that question...
I told the person in question later on, and apparently the context for Hisa-san’s question came from the fact that Mr. Awkward had shown him the 巨根 kanji I’d written on a piece of paper. He went to clear it up with Hisa-san, thinking that Hisa-san thought he had given it to me, rather than the other way around, but there was no misunderstanding. We agreed that Mr. Awkard just says weird things.
LOL
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